Thursday, 6 October 2011

Deceased Online - Corby, Greenwich and Angus

DATA FOR A 6TH LONDON COUNCIL area, cemetery maps showing exact grave locations for 100,000 Angus (Scotland) burials and all records for England’s ‘Little Scotland’, have been added to the Deceased Online cemetery and cremation records web portal. The addition of records for Greenwich’s Eltham Crematorium means the borough becomes the 6th London council with data on the website, the others being Brent, Camden, Havering, Islington and Merton.

Initially, just over 60,000 computerised records have been added from what is one of the biggest and busiest crematoria in London. In total, there are 208,000 cremations and it is hoped that records for all of these will be added to Deceased Online over the next few months.

An interesting addition to the website is the inclusion of detailed cemetery maps for burials in the Scottish county of Angus. After conducting research and finding the cemetery or burial ground where a long-lost ancestor is buried, many family historians are frustrated that they can’t find the plot or even a rough location for their ancestor’s last resting place. And, on a cold and wet Tuesday afternoon in February, there is usually no-one around to ask.

For nearly 100,000 burials in over 64,000 lairs (graves) in Angus, Deceased Online has made this job much easier. We have vectorised and digitised a number of the largest cemeteries (and a few smaller ones) in the region and created maps which show the exact locations of most of the burials and lairs. (There are a few small areas we are still working on). For each burial, there are three maps which indicate, first, the whole of the cemetery highlighting the relevant grave; next, a map with an extracted section highlighting the grave; and finally a close-up of a smaller, detailed cemetery section highlighting the grave. The maps make it easy to find graves even if there are no memorials or even grave reference tags.

Finally….

It has to be one of those great pub quiz questions: which English town has two Church of Scotland churches? It’s not Berwick-upon-Tweed (whose football team play in the Scottish league) and it’s not any of the border towns. In fact the town is buried in deepest Northamptonshire and is recorded as ‘Kori's by’ in the Domesday Book.

Corby, as it is now known, has been linked with iron production for thousands of years and became one of the UK’s premier steel towns in the 1930’s. When Stewarts and Lloyds constructed a large steelworks in 1934/5, migrant workers from, especially, the west coast of Scotland flocked to what became ‘England’s largest village’.

The Wikipedia entry for Corby describes the ‘Corbyite’ accent as sounding Glaswegian” and notes that while 19% of the town’s population are first generation Scottish, one in three Corbyites are of Scottish ancestry.

For genealogists and family historians seeking Scottish connections in England, the 11,100+ burial records for Corby’s two cemeteries – Old Cemetery and Shire Lodge - provide an important link to what could be lost ancestors. The records, dating back to 1899, feature scans of burial registers and grave details. It is hoped that cemetery maps and photos of memorial will be included shortly.